The Conservative Party, honourable and faithful to its King, unfortunately has not always produced leaders of superior endowments who were at the same time skilful, tactically trained politicians. The agrarian wing was at times too strongly marked and was a burden to the party. Moreover, memories of the period of conflict were still too lively. I counselled union with the Liberals, but found little support. I often pointed out that the National Liberalls in the empire were true to the empire and to the Emperor, for which reason they should be thoroughly welcome to the Conservatives as allies; that I could not and did not wish to govern without them in the empire, and was absolutely unwilling to govern against them; that North German conservatism was misunderstood in some parts of the empire because of differences in historical development; and that, therefore, the National Liberals were the natural allies. It was owing to these views of mine, for instance, that I removed Court Preacher Stookey, a man of brilliant achievement asia social missionary, from his post, since ho made a demagogical provocative "speech in South Germany; aimed against the Liberals there.
The Centre Party was welded together by the Kulturkampf and was strongly anti-Protestant and hostile to the empire. Notwithstanding this, I had dealings with many important men of the party and managed to interest them in practical collaboration for the good of all. In this Schorlemer (the father) was especially helpful to me. He never made @ secret of his Prussian loyalty to his King. His son, the well-known Minister of Agriculture, even joined the Conservative Party. In many matters the Centre ce-operated; at one period it possessed, in its old leader, Windthorst, the _keeriest politician, in the Legislature. Nevertheless, in spite of all this, one could not help being aware of the underlying Centrist conviction that the interests of the Roman Church must always be maintained and never neglected to a secondary place.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.